This is a SPOILER-HEAVY Review, so if you want to know my thoughts and want to see the film, watch it and then come back. It was impossible for me to get my thoughts out without discussing major plot details, so you've been warned.
*Directed by Julius Onah
*Starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw, David Oyelowo, Elizabeth Debicki, Zhang Ziyi, Daniel Brühl, Chris O'Dowd, John Ortiz, Askel Hennie, Roger Davies
Hello everyone! So this was a film that completely snuck up on us due to the fact that we weren't really expecting a release date so soon. I mean it's crazy to think that I had this movie on My Most Anticipated Movies of 2017 list and even though pushed to 2018 I was still hyped to see another Cloverfield movie. I was a big fan of 2008's Cloverfield, which was a really great underrated suspenseful horror found footage movie. 10 Cloverfield Lane was probably one of the best thrillers in recent years as well, so of course I was jacked to find out on Super Bowl Sunday that from the first teaser, which was really cool, it was coming out soon to Netflix, and then look on Twitter and find out it was coming out that night. I mean this was a dream come true! I mean one of my Most Anticipated films of the year I can just watch right at home!? This is incredible, right?
I will say the major positives of this movie are the performances. Gugu Mbatha-Raw, I thought did a really excellent job giving some emotional weight to a pretty compelling lead female character. Daniel Brühl also does a very great job as does David Oleyowo taking initiative as the leader of this operation. Not to mention that the production design to really give the film that claustrophobic feel was really fantastic. A lot of great practical work there to go along with really well-done visual effects. Dan Mindel's cinematography work was also very good to give the movie that intense edge. For those who don't know he collaborated with JJ Abrams before, so the work here shows. Bear McCreary's score whose work I'm familiar with on The Walking Dead and 10 Cloverfield Lane was also quality work.
Overall, The Cloverfield Paradox was a really good film...for about the first 20 minutes and, boy, does it pain me to say it with this talent involved because I was not a fan of this movie at all. What this movie could've done to make it an integral part of this Cloverfield franchise was to completely rewrite the screenplay they had for this movie. This honestly didn't feel like a Cloverfield movie that challenged audiences to really think about this story after the fact and try to figure out how certain events fit together. This was merely a dumbed-down science fiction movie that made plot points feel so incredibly obvious and in order to give the film conflict didn't really have any reason of being there. In fact, the way the alternate universe aspect fit in doesn't really make sense in the long run.
So the crew of this space station wants to use particle energy and transfer it to Earth since there's a lack of it down there. However, this energy is so strong that it causes them to get zapped into an alternate reality where we can pretty much figure it out for ourselves because Elizabeth Debicki's character recognizes Gugu Mbatha-Raw's character even though she's never seen Debicki before. So there's a hint there right? No, someone couldn't have said that at the start when they were transported. NOT EVEN THE GUY WHO WAS WATCHING A NEWS REPORTER INTERVIEWING AN AUTHOR ABOUT WHAT THIS PARTICLE ENERGY COULD DO! "Hmmmm the Earth is gone! This doesn't look right! Since we have such an ungodly amount of energy, maybe I should mention something that someone said considering the Earth is gone and we found an astronaut nearly dead inside the walls of the ship who recognizes some of the crew members!" In fact, why even have that dumb news reporter scene? Imagine how so much better it would've been if we as viewers could figure out the alternate dimension aspect for ourselves!
Also, why did the energy source that powered their ship have to be hidden inside that idiot German astronaut's body? And how did the worms get inside? Because it's a Cloverfield movie and there needed to be horror elements. Ugh! And Debicki's character is inside the wall of the crew's specific ship because? Chris O'Dowd's arm detaching is convenient because...comic relief? Like the film has these plot holes left wide open and doesn't leave this trail of breadcrumbs that makes us as viewers interested to find out what actually happened. It just makes the plot even more confusing. Also, the reveal that they're at the other side of the Sun away from Earth I thought was such lazy writing because they could've went so many different places with the alternate universe approach. It's like there was more focus on making the movie more entertaining with horror and even comedy elements, oddly enough.
I'm fine with the idea of this monster from these movies to be from the unknown, or another dimension, since this energy was capable of tearing open a hole in space. There's good potential there for not just the franchise, but this movie alone with the emotional core being Gugu Mbatha-Raw's family, which called for greatness and she gave a good performance in the process. The 20 minutes I liked from this movie was how they introduced her character as well as her husband's. The subplot with her husband rescuing the girl I thought were very well-done scenes as well. However, it just felt like a large chunk of the narrative were a bunch of different ideas thrown in and the writer couldn't figure out how to resolve these subplots and tell a great suspenseful, thought-provoking, and coherent narrative.
It's also probably easy to see a movie like this that comes off as derivative since it's like Alien where a crew of astronauts are together and then killed off one by one by some all-powerful force in space. There can still be good stories told that might feel similar, it's just how you tell it. One of the most underrated movies of last year for me was Life starring Jake Gyllenhaal, which could've been just another pathetic re-creation of Alien. The reason why that film worked well was because it told a compelling straightforward story that made you care about the people involved in such distress and it took liberties in the major plot-points to be different than Alien as well, which I really appreciated. Here, there's just none of that effort and it shows in a very poorly written screenplay.
The movie tries to shoehorn in the villain subplot with Elizabeth Debicki, which turned out to be fairly obvious because it is a very stern and mysterious performance throughout. She doesn't become the villain until the third act of the film and it almost didn't need to be there considering it felt like an afterthought. Also, can we mention how Chris O'Dowd's role as the comic relief was like the Jar Jar Binks of the movie? I'm sorry, but the way his death scene was choreographed was really cheesy. I laughed out loud when that happened! His one liners just came out of nowhere and felt like they belonged in a Disney Channel Original Movie. I love Chris O'Dowd from The IT Crowd, but his character was written terribly here.
Luckily, as far as I know besides the particle energy bringing the monster to Earth and possibly the aliens from 10 Cloverfield Lane, there's no other deep connections between this movie and the previous two that taints them, which makes it an all around useless hour and forty two minute science fiction schlock piece. I thought the shuttle the astronauts were in towards the end of the movie was what awoke the monster in the first film, but obviously that monster already destroyed the Earth and when that creature awoke it was satellite that hit it. I guess this movie just makes events from the previous two open ended, but this entry wasn't necessary except the element about particle energy.
The Cloverfield Paradox has slightly compelling hints of great material in our lead character and expanding the universe, but with unnecessary and horrifically written plot points, it becomes a dumbed-down, forgotten sci-fi thriller.
*Directed by Julius Onah
*Starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw, David Oyelowo, Elizabeth Debicki, Zhang Ziyi, Daniel Brühl, Chris O'Dowd, John Ortiz, Askel Hennie, Roger Davies
Hello everyone! So this was a film that completely snuck up on us due to the fact that we weren't really expecting a release date so soon. I mean it's crazy to think that I had this movie on My Most Anticipated Movies of 2017 list and even though pushed to 2018 I was still hyped to see another Cloverfield movie. I was a big fan of 2008's Cloverfield, which was a really great underrated suspenseful horror found footage movie. 10 Cloverfield Lane was probably one of the best thrillers in recent years as well, so of course I was jacked to find out on Super Bowl Sunday that from the first teaser, which was really cool, it was coming out soon to Netflix, and then look on Twitter and find out it was coming out that night. I mean this was a dream come true! I mean one of my Most Anticipated films of the year I can just watch right at home!? This is incredible, right?
I will say the major positives of this movie are the performances. Gugu Mbatha-Raw, I thought did a really excellent job giving some emotional weight to a pretty compelling lead female character. Daniel Brühl also does a very great job as does David Oleyowo taking initiative as the leader of this operation. Not to mention that the production design to really give the film that claustrophobic feel was really fantastic. A lot of great practical work there to go along with really well-done visual effects. Dan Mindel's cinematography work was also very good to give the movie that intense edge. For those who don't know he collaborated with JJ Abrams before, so the work here shows. Bear McCreary's score whose work I'm familiar with on The Walking Dead and 10 Cloverfield Lane was also quality work.
Overall, The Cloverfield Paradox was a really good film...for about the first 20 minutes and, boy, does it pain me to say it with this talent involved because I was not a fan of this movie at all. What this movie could've done to make it an integral part of this Cloverfield franchise was to completely rewrite the screenplay they had for this movie. This honestly didn't feel like a Cloverfield movie that challenged audiences to really think about this story after the fact and try to figure out how certain events fit together. This was merely a dumbed-down science fiction movie that made plot points feel so incredibly obvious and in order to give the film conflict didn't really have any reason of being there. In fact, the way the alternate universe aspect fit in doesn't really make sense in the long run.
So the crew of this space station wants to use particle energy and transfer it to Earth since there's a lack of it down there. However, this energy is so strong that it causes them to get zapped into an alternate reality where we can pretty much figure it out for ourselves because Elizabeth Debicki's character recognizes Gugu Mbatha-Raw's character even though she's never seen Debicki before. So there's a hint there right? No, someone couldn't have said that at the start when they were transported. NOT EVEN THE GUY WHO WAS WATCHING A NEWS REPORTER INTERVIEWING AN AUTHOR ABOUT WHAT THIS PARTICLE ENERGY COULD DO! "Hmmmm the Earth is gone! This doesn't look right! Since we have such an ungodly amount of energy, maybe I should mention something that someone said considering the Earth is gone and we found an astronaut nearly dead inside the walls of the ship who recognizes some of the crew members!" In fact, why even have that dumb news reporter scene? Imagine how so much better it would've been if we as viewers could figure out the alternate dimension aspect for ourselves!
Also, why did the energy source that powered their ship have to be hidden inside that idiot German astronaut's body? And how did the worms get inside? Because it's a Cloverfield movie and there needed to be horror elements. Ugh! And Debicki's character is inside the wall of the crew's specific ship because? Chris O'Dowd's arm detaching is convenient because...comic relief? Like the film has these plot holes left wide open and doesn't leave this trail of breadcrumbs that makes us as viewers interested to find out what actually happened. It just makes the plot even more confusing. Also, the reveal that they're at the other side of the Sun away from Earth I thought was such lazy writing because they could've went so many different places with the alternate universe approach. It's like there was more focus on making the movie more entertaining with horror and even comedy elements, oddly enough.
I'm fine with the idea of this monster from these movies to be from the unknown, or another dimension, since this energy was capable of tearing open a hole in space. There's good potential there for not just the franchise, but this movie alone with the emotional core being Gugu Mbatha-Raw's family, which called for greatness and she gave a good performance in the process. The 20 minutes I liked from this movie was how they introduced her character as well as her husband's. The subplot with her husband rescuing the girl I thought were very well-done scenes as well. However, it just felt like a large chunk of the narrative were a bunch of different ideas thrown in and the writer couldn't figure out how to resolve these subplots and tell a great suspenseful, thought-provoking, and coherent narrative.
It's also probably easy to see a movie like this that comes off as derivative since it's like Alien where a crew of astronauts are together and then killed off one by one by some all-powerful force in space. There can still be good stories told that might feel similar, it's just how you tell it. One of the most underrated movies of last year for me was Life starring Jake Gyllenhaal, which could've been just another pathetic re-creation of Alien. The reason why that film worked well was because it told a compelling straightforward story that made you care about the people involved in such distress and it took liberties in the major plot-points to be different than Alien as well, which I really appreciated. Here, there's just none of that effort and it shows in a very poorly written screenplay.
The movie tries to shoehorn in the villain subplot with Elizabeth Debicki, which turned out to be fairly obvious because it is a very stern and mysterious performance throughout. She doesn't become the villain until the third act of the film and it almost didn't need to be there considering it felt like an afterthought. Also, can we mention how Chris O'Dowd's role as the comic relief was like the Jar Jar Binks of the movie? I'm sorry, but the way his death scene was choreographed was really cheesy. I laughed out loud when that happened! His one liners just came out of nowhere and felt like they belonged in a Disney Channel Original Movie. I love Chris O'Dowd from The IT Crowd, but his character was written terribly here.
Luckily, as far as I know besides the particle energy bringing the monster to Earth and possibly the aliens from 10 Cloverfield Lane, there's no other deep connections between this movie and the previous two that taints them, which makes it an all around useless hour and forty two minute science fiction schlock piece. I thought the shuttle the astronauts were in towards the end of the movie was what awoke the monster in the first film, but obviously that monster already destroyed the Earth and when that creature awoke it was satellite that hit it. I guess this movie just makes events from the previous two open ended, but this entry wasn't necessary except the element about particle energy.
The Cloverfield Paradox has slightly compelling hints of great material in our lead character and expanding the universe, but with unnecessary and horrifically written plot points, it becomes a dumbed-down, forgotten sci-fi thriller.
Verdict: D+
It really bites that this wasn't as good as it could've been considering I was a fan of the previous two films. I was really excited for this one, so if you stuck around for my review and haven't seen it yet I wouldn't give this one your time of day. I know there were people out there who enjoyed it and I'm glad they did, but this just didn't do it for me.
I'm still optimistic! I know there's a supernatural horror film being developed in this series taking place during WWII. That sounds like a cool idea and I'm not done with this franchise quite yet. We can hope it gets better from there.
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